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CHILLICOTHE, Ohio —William A. “Bill” Inman is guilty, a jury determined after less than three
hours of deliberation today.

They retired to the jury room at 2:30 p.m. after Hocking County Common Pleas Court Judge John
T. Wallace instructed them on deliberations. The returned with guilty verdicts on six charges just
hours later.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers delivered their closing statements to the jury this morning.

Inman, 48, could receive the death penalty if he is convicted of aggravated murder and other
charges in the abduction, zip-tie strangulation and corpse abuse of his 25-year-old
daughter-in-law, Summer D. Inman, on March 22, 2011.

Wallace instructed the jury for about an hour. On the first aggravated-murder count, jurors
must determine whether if guilty, Inman was the principal offender or, alternatively wasn’t, but
acted with prior calculation and design in aiding and abetting the killing, Wallace said.

On the second aggravated-murder count, jurors have a legal menu of three choices: whether if
guilty, Inman was the principal offender. Or, Wallace said, jurors could find whether Inman was
guilty of the lesser offense of murder, or of the lesser offense of reckless homicide.

The other charges on which jurors must deliver verdicts are murder, kidnapping, tampering
with evidence and gross abuse of a corpse.

Paul Scarsella, an assistant state attorney general helping to prosecute the case, said in
his closing that Inman was complicit in plotting and helping to carry out the murder of Summer
Inman to gain custody of the three children she had with Inman’s son, William A. “Inman” II.

“If she’s not there, who would get custody? The father and his parents,” Scarsella told
jurors.

“It doesn’t matter who put the zip tie around Summer’s neck. All three of them were working
together,” Scarsella said, referring to Bill Inman and his wife, Sandra, and their son. “That is
complicity.”

“Summer Inman was going to die that night at the hands of the Inman family,” Scarsella said. “
Bill knew that this was the plan and he helped.”

To Bill Inman’s thinking, Scarsella said, “The plan was to kill her to get her out of the way
so those grandkids could come home where they belonged. He knew that this was the plan and he was
an active participant.”

Defense attorney Andrew Stevenson said his client was guilty only of cleaning up his son’s
mess and argued for a verdict of reckless homicide.

“It was a tragedy,” Stevenson said. “Something went wrong.”

Stevenson told jurors that Bill Inman did not take Summer’s life. It was Will who, amped up
on his prescription stimulant drug called Phentermine hcl, diet Mountain Dew and adrenalin, pulled
the zip tie and rendered his wife unconscious within 10 to 15 seconds, Stevenson said.

Summer Inman’s body was found a week later stuffed down an underground septic tank in Athens
County.

Over four days of trial testimony last week, prosecutors used eyewitnesses, cellphone and GPS
records, forensic experts and others to piece together for jurors the story of what happened.

Jurors were explicitly not told that Will Inman was sentenced to life in prison without
parole for the murder of his wife. Or that he was named as the killer in two statements.

Wallace rejected two attempts by defense lawyers to share with jurors two statements that
would eliminate Bill Inman as the killer.

One was wife Sandra K. Inman’s March 29, 2011 statement to a Hocking County sheriff’s
investigator in which she said that her son Will Inman had killed Summer Inman accidentally. She
also disclosed the location of her daughter-in-law’s body.

The other statement was part of Hocking County Prosecutor Laina Fetherolf’s opening argument
to jurors in Will Inman’s trial last year in which she said that Will Inman “pulled that tie until
it cut so tightly into Summer’s neck that it left an impression.”

The case is unusual, Bill Inman’s lawyers have said, because Bill Inman is on trial for the
same charges on which his son has been convicted, and could get the death penalty.

By the time Summer was abducted, she and her husband were locked in a nasty divorce and
custody battle.

Relations were so tense that when Will collected their three children for visits, the
exchange took place not at the Logan home that Summer and the kids had shared with her parents
since she left her husband in June 2010, but at the local police station.

As Summer prepared to go to work cleaning the Century National Bank after hours, her mother,
Debra Cook, took a phone call from Will Inman. He would be unable to pick up the kids as scheduled
on March 23, he reported, because he was having car trouble.

Summer had dinner with the kids and her boyfriend Adam Peters before she drove his car the
two blocks to the bank. Her mother and boyfriend settled in to watch Dancing with the Stars. Summer
always called when she was leaving the bank to let them know she was coming home. She did not.

Friends Kylee Helman and Emily Hedges were out walking near the bank parking lot when they
heard and saw a commotion that night. A woman was curled up on the ground screaming while two men
dressed in dark clothing used a stun gun on her. A blond-haired woman sat behind the wheel of a
white car that resembled an unmarked police cruiser.

Summer’s mother and boyfriend went to the bank when she didn’t come home. On the ground
outside the bank they found the back piece of her cellphone, the keys to the car that she had
driven, and her half-full bottle of Mountain Dew.

A blue ballcap lay on the ground. A forensic scientist would later determine the hat bore
Bill Inman’s DNA.

Summer’s family suspected Will Inman and his parents had something to do with her
disappearance. Logan police got to work that night.

Police Chief Aaron Miller reached Will on his cellphone the next day and also spoke to his
father. They said they had spent the night of March 22-23 stranded on the shoulder of I-480 near
Cleveland because the car broke down, they said.

They gave the same story to the FBI agents who interviewed them on March 23 at the Akron
house where they were living.

Their cellphone and GPS data told a different story. Experts used the data to track their
whereabouts. They were in Logan and Nelsonville on March 22, and by the morning of March 23, were
parked at a car wash vacuuming station near Cleveland.

The car wash surveillance tape showed Bill and Sandy Inman vacuuming and wiping down the car’s
interior. They cleaned the inside so thoroughly that an Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation
agent later could not find a single fingerprint.

The Inmans were arrested on March 24, 2011 and charged with Summer Inman’s kidnapping. They
were charged with murder after her body was recovered on March 29.